By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim

The Murder of Mashal Khan and its Implications for the CPEC

The
recent lynching of a university student in Pakistan who had been falsely
accused of blasphemy highlights the fact that terrorist and separatist violence
are not the sole security threats facing the successful completion of the
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Indeed, apart from the security
threats posed by militant and
separatist groups like the Balochistan Liberation Front and
the Pakistani Taliban, CPEC’s planners and the Pakistani government need to
prepare for the possibility of vigilante and mob violence instigated against
CPEC personnel. Such violence could be triggered by false accusations, as was
demonstrated by the brutal murder of Mashal Khan.

Mashal Khan’s
murder occurred on April 13, 2017 at Abdul Wali Khan
University in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. On that morning, rumors —
later determined to be false — had circulated around the campus that Khan had
been found “promoting the Ahmadi faith on Facebook,” an act which is considered blasphemous in
Pakistan. Rightly concerned about the growing tension, Khan’s instructors drove
him “from campus to another location.” However, he returned to campus, pointing
out: “I have done nothing wrong, why should I hide?” As one of his instructors
noted of Khan, “he didn’t understand the
environment he was living in.”

Beena
Sarwar recounts what happened next: “When
the mob came for him, he stood no chance ... They stripped, beat and clubbed
him, then shot him. Videos circulating online show young men, some carrying
backpacks, kicking and throwing stones at his near-naked, bloodied, lifeless
body ... The police too said they were helpless. Hopelessly outnumbered and
inadequately trained, the best they could do for Mashal was to prevent the mob
from burning his battered body, which they took away even as dozens of charged
young men demanded it back.”

However,
according to eyewitness testimony, the police officers at the
scene were complicit with the lynch mob: “They could have easily saved his life
but they stood away from the mob ... I heard one officer say it’s good that
they sent this non-believer to hell.” Such complicity of law enforcement
officials with lawbreakers represents a pernicious form of lawlessness that the
Pakistani state will have to address with its ongoing arrests and investigations, and
future prosecutions and punishments, of those responsible for Mashal Khan’s brutal
murder and the violent desecration of his corpse.

Salahuddin Khan
Mehsud, the Inspector-General of Police of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa province, has confirmed that there was no evidence that Mashal Khan
had uploaded blasphemous content to social media. However, “a lot of activity
had occurred after the incident,” and “many manufactured and edited pictures,
and videos were now circulating on social media sites.” As Khan’s university
instructor Ziaullah Hamdard noted,
following the murder, “fake accounts were created in Mashal’s name on social
media and [blasphemous] things were posted.”

Mashal
Khan’s Facebook status update from last December warning that “someone had made
a fake profile in his name and to malign him” has gone viral following his
murder, and IT experts have warned that a creating a fake profile on
Facebook or other social media platforms is “an easy way to create hate for you
especially among a group of people who may have issues with your views.”

Despite
the growing evidence that Mashal Khan had been framed for blasphemy, some members
of the local population have turned against his family because of the false
accusation. Two hardline clerics in Khan’s home town of Swabi are currently
under police
investigation for spreading “hate speech against the
slain student and his family.” The harassment suffered by Khan’s family over
the false accusation did not stop there: “A local imam had refused to lead the
funeral prayers at Khan’s funeral … A technician who was asked to do so in the
cleric’s place was confronted by several people afterwards.”

Not
surprisingly, Mashal Khan’s
father has requested that his son’s killers be tried in
military court, given his “lack of faith in the civilian courts to deliver
justice.” His distrust of the justice system is supported by the observation of
a senior police officer that “many members of the police, prosecution service
and judiciary sympathised with the attackers and he did not expect any
guilty verdicts.”

As
human rights advocates have observed, the blasphemy law has been used by
agitators to incite vigilante and mob violence, and most of them have gone
unpunished. Since 1990, dozens of people have been murdered in Pakistan over
accusations of blasphemy. Indeed, in the week following Mashal Khan’s murder, two
subsequent instances of vigilante and mob violence related to blasphemy
accusations have occurred. First, three sisters shot
dead a man whom they accused of having committed blasphemy in 2004:

“According
to the police, the three women went to the house of Mazhar Hussain Syed, a
faith healer, and asked him to pray for them. They also asked him if his son,
Fazal Abbas, had returned from abroad. When told that he had returned from
Belgium, they asked if they could see him. As soon as Abbas, 45, appeared
before the women, they opened fire on him with the weapons they had brought
with them secretly. Abbas died on the spot. The women raised slogans in
jubilation after his death, asserting that they had finally eliminated a
blasphemer.

Should
the industrial employment offered under CPEC lead to similar societal changes
in rural Pakistan, the CPEC planners and the Pakistani government should
prepare for outbursts of protests or even violence against the factories in
CPEC’s industrial zones.

In
the second incident following Khan’s murder, a mob attacked an apparently mentally-ill man who
had “declared himself a messiah and said he would lead his followers to
paradise.” After his arrest, the mob proceeded to attack the police station
demanding that the man be handed over to them to be lynched, prompting the
police to fire “tear gas and live rounds on the mob, injuring eight
protesters.”

Pakistan’s
blasphemy law, despite being of concern to human rights advocates, does not in
itself constitute a challenge to the successful completion or running of CPEC.
This is because foreign investors and businessmen, as well as expatriate
workers, have long understood the importance of obeying the laws and customs of
the countries they invest or work in, including those laws and customs which may
restrict their speech. The Chinese investors, managers, and workers involved
with CPEC are expected to obey the blasphemy law when they are in Pakistan,
just as they do the lèse-majesté law when they are in Thailand, and similar
laws in other countries. However, what does pose a threat to the successful completion
and running of CPEC is the potential for local agitators to use the blasphemy
law as an alibi to incite mob violence against those involved with CPEC. Mashal Khan’s murder illustrates this, for even though he was innocent of blasphemy, the conspirators
who sought his death used their false accusations of blasphemy to agitate the
crowd into a murderous frenzy, and they framed him for blasphemy after he was
already dead.

The
Pakistani government’s establishment of a special security
force for CPEC does not resolve this danger, as the
security personnel could — as noted earlier of the policemen present at Mashal
Khan’s lynching — neglect their sworn duties and support the mob instead. Further
complicating that issue is the new transportation infrastructure being
constructed under CPEC, as these new roads, highways, and railways could
facilitate the movement and spatial spread of mob violence. If the Pakistani
government does not nip this problem in the bud, it is possible that local
agitators could deploy the blasphemy law to incite mass violence against those
working at CPEC projects.

One
possible strategy to combat this problem — which intriguingly echoes the
ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi’s law
that those who make false accusations should suffer the punishments for the very
same crimes that they had falsely accused their victims of committing — was
recently suggested by the Pakistani Senate’s Standing Committee on Interior,
which is that “people falsely accusing others of blasphemy should be punished
like a blasphemer.” If this reflexive penalty against false accusations had originally
been part of the blasphemy law, Mashal Khan might still be alive today.

One
potential source of tension are the social changes that can be expected to emerge
from the industrial zones that
will be established under CPEC. In Cambodia, for instance, such industrial zones
have led to the emergence of a new class of financially independent urban
women. While the incomes that these women earn from their factory jobs may be
low compared to those working similar jobs in other countries, these wages are
higher than what these women can earn back in their home villages, and many of
these working women find themselves enjoying the earning power to “support
themselves as well as their village-based families” (Derks, 2008, pp. 4-5).
This earning power and their new lives in the city give these women options to
recreate their identities, or at least to find their own “balance between what
they consider to be ‘old’ or ‘traditional’ in village life and what they see as
‘too modern’ in the city” (Derks, 2008, p. 13; Lim and Widyono, 2016, p. 80).

Such
economic empowerment is however a threat to the patriarchal establishment back
in these women’s home villages, and even though many of these women have become
the primary breadwinners for their rural families, suspicious fantasies of
these women’s urban lives leads to their unkind depiction by the villagers as “loose
women” who behave in “improper, immoral, or nontraditional ways,” especially
when compared with the Chbab Srey,
the traditional code of conduct for Cambodian women (Derks, 2008, pp. 11-12). Davis
(2011) highlights how the resentment felt by these rural families towards these
working women comes to the fore during Pchum
Ben (Cambodia’s annual festival of ancestor worship) when these women,
having returned to their villages for the festival, are teased by their rural
relations as preta (hungry ghosts).
While these families are more than happy to spend the money remitted to them by
these women, they are not inclined to show these women the respect or gratitude
that they deserve for their hard work and generosity (pp. 327-329).

Should
the industrial employment offered under CPEC lead to similar societal changes
in rural Pakistan, the CPEC planners and the Pakistani government should
prepare for outbursts of protests or even violence against the factories in
CPEC’s industrial zones. The women who deviate from their traditional roles by
seeking employment in these factories could find themselves falling victim to false
blasphemy accusations by reactionary activists seeking to preserve the
traditional structure of family life. While the CPEC industrial zones have yet
to be built, the experience of social transformation following the
establishment of industrial zones in other countries like Cambodia highlights
the likely social changes that the CPEC planners and the Pakistani government
need to prepare for. Given the massive USD 46 billion
investment China is putting into CPEC, both the
Chinese and Pakistani governments will have to plan for this and other security
challenges that could threaten to derail the megaproject.

Lim,
A. C. H., and Widyono, B. (2016). Politics and social transformation: The ancient-modern
village of Cambodia. In A. Rappa (Ed.), The
Village and Its Discontents: Meaning and Criticism in Late Modernity (pp.
63-86). Singapore: World Scientific.

About The Author

Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a research fellow with International Public Policy Pte. Ltd. (IPP), and is the author of Cambodia and the Politics of Aesthetics (Routledge 2013). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and has taught at Pannasastra University of Cambodia and the American University of Nigeria. Prior to joining IPP, he was a research fellow with the Longus Institute for Development and Strategy.